News and analysis of critical issues in homeland security

January 17, 2006

Thanks to the magic of Google, a large archive of DHS’s internal (and unclassified) daily news bulletins are available on the Internet via this Google search. If you run the search, the direct links don’t work, but the cached version of each page is stored on Google’s servers and can be opened for each of these 1500+ links.

These daily bulletins are prepared for DHS by a company called Bulletin News, which describes its customized services in the following way:

BulletinNews’ briefings have replaced news “clipping” services for much of the President’s Cabinet and their staffs. Our service is completely customized to a department or agency, providing the most comprehensive source for all the day’s relevant news from thousands of media outlets – all boiled down in one briefing.

That description of the service doesn’t mesh with reality. In contrast with DOD’s well-edited Early Bird, these DHS daily bulletins are 35,000-40,000 words long, i.e. fifty single-spaced pages; and when bulletins run to that length, more is definitely less. I can’t imagine that anyone at DHS actually has time to read this – in fact, I hope no one has time to read it. For what it’s worth, DHS pays Bulletin News $328,000/year for this service.

I wish those pages weren’t password protected. Back in the day when they were accessible through a public url, they were a great resource for looking for interesting tidbits. The FBI had a good one too.

site:bulletinnews.com/fbi/

I guess letting the public see what news articles its top leaders might see presents a security threat…